Although this image is centered on the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Titan, here the sun illuminates mainly the trailing hemisphere of Saturn's largest moon.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 9, 2008 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 938 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.774 million kilometers (1.102 million miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 56 degrees. Image scale is 11 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.